I have the same 2009 MBP as you, and have had no issues with the upgrade at all. The only "horror story" I have had in recent history was the IOS 5 update bricked my iPhone 4, but luckily I had Apple Care and it was promptly replaced

I recommend Lion if it is clean installed. It was buggier and vexing before when I bought a MBA with Lion installed onto it and had Apple Store migrate all my stuff onto it, including older apps that I otherwise had no need to upgrade. I have since wiped the drive clean and installed updated versions of apps (at dear expense) but have a stable platform now.

If you're a real task worker, with lots of windows on the screen at one time, do NOT upgrade to Lion, as mission control in Lion is definitely a step back from the nice Expose interface of snow leopard. If you upgrade, sooner or later, you'll see the flaw in mission control when you have a lot of windows open that will lead to frustration.

We were "bullied" into upgrading to Lion to keep the functionality we had with MobileMe. I upgraded all our machines to Lion. My wife experienced intermittent wifi issues. There was a gigabit ethernet cable lying in the cold air return about 8 feet from her Mac mini. Problem solved. Noone else had any problems. Maybe I'm an exception but I hardly used expose but I do use mission control. It's not that bad, really. It's a little annoying that I get a duplicate copy of everything on my second monitor in mc, but it's not a big deal really. It's annoying I can't simply click anywhere or hit escape to get out of dashboard but it's not a big deal really. There were a few early bugs like incompatibility with non-Apple NAS drives and incompatibility with non-Apple VNC but both those problems are solved for me now. By moving to Lion, I now have photostream which makes getting photos off my phone a non event. I also have the same great sync of contact information and calendar that I was used to with mm. As soon as I get flickr or picasa set up the way I like it, I can get myself a refund for the balance of my mm family pack.

If iCloud comes out for SL, even for a modest fee, perhaps people can stick with SL if they like it better. As for me, I'm using Lion and it's working fine. I highly recommend it.

Staff Member

We were "bullied" into upgrading to Lion to keep the functionality we had with MobileMe.

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bullied, you mean apple was threatening you? No one was twisting your arm to upgrade. True, to have new functionality you need to upgrade but I wouldn't say bullied. You ultimately have the freedom to stay on SL or upgrade.

No I would not. I was really excited about every new release they have had since 10.1! But then I seen the the "features" they were adding to Lion and I wasn't impressed. Then when it launched, like a good little Mac fanboy I upgraded. They ruined spaces and expose. They took away my ability to manage my own files by saving them when and how I wanted to. They turned my second monitor into a paper weight for "full screen" apps.

And then there are the bugs... pretty big ones, that still exist after two updates. We have a brand new imac that came with 10.7.2 preinstalled. It locks up constantly. We finally discovered that it was Time Machine locking the whole machine up. We turned if off and its not locking up anymore... to bad the wifi is still flaky. This same iMac running Windows (and now even Snow Leopard) doesn't have any of these problems, so its not the router or the computer.

So no I don't recommend it, in fact I recommend NOT using Lion, even if that means you have to go to Windows 7 or Linux. I think Lion, which was suppose to finally be about the Mac ("back to the mac") has proven that apple doesn't care about their computers any more. They don't care about the people who supported them all the years before they had the iPhone, iPads, and iPods running iOS. Its really sad.

I typically endeavor to be a slow adopter. But I upgraded to Lion on my mid-2009 Macbook some weeks ago and ran into few problems. I don't rely on my Macbook so it was a good test case. There are a couple of PPC programs I would like to have the option to use, so I spent some time getting a virtual Snow Leopard machine up and running on my I3 iMac via Virtual Box. Got all that squared away, had a solid clone, upgraded the I3. No problems. Air Drop is handy. I like Launchpad and yes, even Mission Control. Like the full screen for some things. Like Photo Booth. Like hot corners. Not a must have, but an incremental at reasonable cost. At least I had no problems and I just did an install from the Ap Store.

I've had issues on a clean install and upgrade on a 2010 MacBook Pro 13 and 15 and when Lion was preinstalled on my Spring 2011 MBP 15, it crashed once in awhile and got spinning beach balls. I got sick of it and loaded a cloned copy of a hard drive with snow leopard on it and had no issues and a HUGE increase in performance.

Strangely, I have 0 issues on an upgraded MacBook Air 11 2010, but after reinstalling it with snow, it ran incredibly faster.

I have been a Mac user since early 80's. I've held off upgrading to Lion till this week as I bought a new MBA and tried to upgrade my iMac 24" 2009 to be able to migrate over. The whole system is now sluggish. Safari won't open any window and I've changed over to Firefox. Software update won't launch. Finder crashes, as does System Preferences. I'm a busy professional and took a shortcut by not doing a clean install. Snow leopard was stable before. Lion is Mac's Vista. It looks like I'm faced with hours of backing up, wiping the hard drive, reinstalling SL, and manually loading the MBA. Also likely to dump MobileMe as it becomes redundant and miss out on iCloud unless Apple make it SL-friendly. Can't seen any good reason to change to Lion, certainly not 250 reasons!!

I've upgraded 4 Mac computers to Lion with no problems which are Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and a Mac Mini. Three are 2009 models and one 2010. All boot up faster. Mail is greatly improved. Spaces are improved and more useful. Now I can sync them all between iCloud with my calenders. I like it.

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